(warning: particularly old content) I don't ask for it to make sense 
12/31/00
It's New Years Eve, and I'm lonely. Oh, I could show up at Kyley's party and be welcomed. Or wander up to Seth and Jase's, and they'd probably be happy to see me. I could even give Monica a call, I'm willing to bet, and get an invitation to whatever method she and Patrick are employing of getting drunk tonight. Not that I particularly want to; while I might have a good time eventually (dancing was very fun, last New Year's at Kyley's), perhaps it's best to just stay at home with my Christmas lights and candles and music. I'm so much more suited to being solitary and melancholy than social and gay. As I said somewhere in here not too many months ago, "I am the anti-fun." I just don't quite belong with large groups of people, joking and laughing and drinking and that entire bit. So instead, I prop a foot up on my desk and settle comfortably into a chair, preparing to spend an evening quietly watching reflections, alone.
And with a peal of silent laughter, I remind myself of something that my five-year-old self could have told me—a mirror can be the most fun dancing partner of all. I wonder how many people passing by, on their way to some riot of a party, are looking in my window and laughing at a long haired solitary dervish. And I raise my hands in the air, grinning, and wave to the freeway while spinning around.
At midnight, I sat on my living room windowsill at an angle that would horrify my mother, and watched five minutes of spectacular fireworks at the Space Needle. My back hurts from preventing me from falling five stories to excruciating pain on a concrete garage floor, but it was worth it. Happy New Year!
12/30/00
Alone, at home, on the couch, wrapped in clothing, a bathrobe, a blanket, propped up on pillows, occasionally munching on a piece of chocolate, I find that I have in myself still the capacity to cry at visions of one of humankind's great accomplishments : watching the Space Shuttle exploding hydrogen, oxygen, aluminum, and ammonium perchlorate to launch away from the planet that spawned us, I can't but feel such feeling that it wells up and falls down my face to wet my cheeks.
It's 2:20 am and I don't want to go to sleep. I have nothing to do that is keeping me awake, of course... my room is clean, my dishes are done, I don't feel like tidying up the main room (it's not really messy anyway), I don't feel like watching mindless TV, I already played a game of AC, I don't want to read the only books I have here, I have no email to catch up on, I don't feel like gimping Ben's request or anything else, I don't feel like doing the ADP busywork that I need to do by Tuesday, no one except Zach has written anything on their pages today and I've read his stuff already, I've already skimmed my comics for the night, there's nothing new on Slashdot and I don't feel like reading the stuff on Ars, I can't translate Kiyoshi's letter because I don't have my kanji dictionary here and looking large numbers of compounds up online is too time consuming... I remember one summer day, oh, it must have been in middle school or so, flopping on the couch and screaming my frustrated boredom to the ceiling. My mother came up with several chores for me to do, and I told her sternly "Mom, you don't understand... boredom isn't the lack of anything to do, it's the lack of desire to do anything!" Unfortunately, sometimes it's both.
Standing at my window, aimlessly staring out at 3:32 am I5 traffic, I learn that the end theme to Star Wars : A New Hope still makes me feel as in love as it did the first time I ever heard it.
12/29/00
Any and all plans to wax philosophic or boring on anything are dependent as to whether I fall asleep on the couch watching TV. Fair warning.
12/28/00
Annie Get Your Gun has a song in it that my mother used to teach me to sing when I was little. It's Annie boasting to the male chauvinist pig that she's unfortunately in love with, I Can Do Anything, Better Than You. I don't think I knew until today that the song was from that musical, but it just plain made my day. And once again made me thank my mother for teaching me to sing that rather than some silly song about duckies (well okay, she taught me those, too, but I don't remember them nearly as well). I'll have to look up the lyrics sometime.... Ohhh man.
Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you!
12/27/00
I was in Radio City Music Hall today. It was incredible—a 6,000 seat theater that I've seen a million times on television, but this wasn't seeing it through the tiny window of a tv set, but actually sitting in there, with all those people around me, watching... the worst show I saw today (or yesterday, for that matter). It was an overproduced "experience," A Christmas Spectacular, with the "World-Famous Rockettes." Dad only got the tickets so that we could be in that theater, and there were parts of the show that were entertaining (mostly when those previously mentioned Rockettes were doing something perfectly in unison... all sixty or so of them), but overall, I had to cringe. The audience (largely comprised of small children) was intensely disrespectful, the staging was lax, and I was glad when it was over. On the other hand, I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change had be dying in laughter this afternoon, and The Unexpected Man this evening, with Alan Bates, was witty, both laugh and thought inducing. I love the theater... even when it's somewhat terrible. Something about seeing a live production gets me entranced as nothing else quite can.
12/26/00
I thought I was going to die when we finally arrived at Newark this morning, and the feeling was reinforced by not sleeping much until 2 pm local time... but I wandered out of bed "early" at 5 pm local, got a shower, gargled... perhaps I won't fall out to the street and die. And that's a very good thing, considering that I'd be falling 29 stories into the middle of Times Square. The view I have into the middle of midtown NYC is amazing! Dad and I saw Cabaret at Studio 54 tonight... I suppose it was good, but I thought the whole thing was in dreadfully bad taste. It's the sort of production that you take your girlfriend or wife to, not your daughter. I certainly would have much preferred to see it with Jim than with Dad. He's driving me nuts. Hitting on everyone, fidgeting like mad, loud and upsetting as ever. Sigh.
12/24/00
Sick, parents fighting, brother being a dick... sometimes, getting to visit the family cat is the only good thing about coming home.
12/23/00
I'm sick. I feel as if a grumbling snot monster crawled up my nose and, halfway towards my brain cavity, decided to make a nest. My throat hurts, my head aches, I'm congested as all hell, and I'm cranky. This is not adding to the being-at-home-for-the-holidays experience. I can't get any sleep because I toss and turn trying to breathe, my eyes are supersensitive to Nikki, and my neck has a nasty crick in it from two days of the aforementioned tossing and turning. In short, I feel ucky.
12/21/00
I got to have two Christmases this year... an unexpected happenstance, but something that made me feel very warm inside. It's nice to know that I've got a second home if I ever need or want it, with Jim's parents.
12/20/00
According to the doctor, I'm fine. Which is a relief, considering that I was absolutely terrified that I wasn't. All weird symptoms should be going away... in a month or two (sigh). It's such a liberating feeling, to have someone who "knows" reassure you that you are not, in fact, going to die (not that I thought I was going to, but that sounds better than "that you are not going to continue feeling annoying uncomfortable for the interminably foreseeable future"). Makes the entire crummy day of driving (somewhat) worth it.
12/19/00
I find it intensely frustrating on those few occasions where I feel the need to truly write something that I'm feeling, rather than monotonously musing on my day, and then... twu is down. Sigh. I suppose I should just get used to it—not every place that could host my page is running off of the computing power that the UW can boast of, and I certainly won't be at the UW forever (as much as it may feel like it). I will say this, however... were I to get an extra couple hundred megs at the U permanently, I'd shift right back. The only reason I moved was to be able to get my mail, and if that situation was rectified, I'm sad to say that I'd have no loyalty to the very generous people who are running twu. I feel rather bad about that.
12/16/00
Shopping... it gives me a headache. I've never understood why some people (both male and female) seem to enjoy it so—after twelve minutes in Northgate today, the pounding began behind my eyes. It's not really the number of people around, though that certainly plays into it; it's the stress of going into the normal world, a place where people gather and talk and buy things that are trendy and pretty. I don't get a headache going into a used bookstore on the Ave... but a few minutes in Barnes and Noble does me in good. I don't particularly sweat walking through Red Square at 10:23 on a Wednesday morning... but trying to navigate the central hall of Northgate just... well, it hurt. At least, for the first time in years, I have about 50% of my shopping done more than a few days before Christmas. The headache is (perhaps, semi-)worth it.
12/15/00
Insert comment here at a point when you are not quite so sleepy.
Room dimly seen, for no reason other than a strange decision made some unmemorable eve in Haggett as I looked around my space. I thought about how many places I would be living in over the next several years, and how I might forget, over the years, the way I'd been, the way I'd wanted to live, in times past. And I decided to make a custom of photographing my room, photographing myself, often. My parents didn't really take pictures of me from the age of six or seven much; I've been trying to create my own flavor of a visual history, I suppose.
12/13/00
Exams 1, me 0. TV 1, me 0. Although I have discovered that Junkyard Wars may very well be my new favorite show.
12/12/00
Well, well. 10:45 pm and while I seem to have done very little beyond jack shit towards studying for my chem 460 skull screw tomorrow, I've got my application to the Hakodate program mostly completed. Ohta sensei graciously agreed to be one of my references, and so did Nakaone sensei! But that can't be taken care of until the next quarter, so I won't worry about it until after the break. It's rather hard to believe that I, the perpetual scaredy-cat, am actually preparing to go abroad by myself.
I haven't done nearly enough productive procrastinating this finals week. Normally, in an effort to not study, I engage in a flurry of cleaning and webpage fussing. However, having been in hiding from my roommates at Jim's for the last week, I haven't really had the resources to procrastinate in my normal fashion. Cleaning his apartment isn't really the same as straightening my own room, and it seems a little rude to sit and do HTML baby coding on his computer when I'm there (though politeness doesn't seem to stop me from playing Alpha Centauri over there constantly... so never mind). As a result, I've spent a lot of time this last week procrastinating by watching TV with Jim or Ian. I don't think I've rotted my brain as a method of finals procrastination since my first quarter of school, and I'm not sure I like it. At least in the past few years, I've gotten some astounding work done during finals week. This quarter, I managed to drool a little.
12/11/00
I really hate to prepare to turn in a paper and know that I did not do very well on it. I hate it when I know that I bullshitted most of it, and that I wouldn't have bothered to to think about it were it not due for a class. I think I shall never again take another philosophy class. At least not likely. I just don't think I was very suited for it. In other finals news, I haven't really studied for Japanese (in almost exactly 12 hours), and not at all for Chem (Thursday at 8:30 am... joy). As to why I haven't studied at all this weekend, I really don't know. Jim has been complaining that he doesn't quite feel like he's done; in contrast, I feel as if I should rightfully be done, and have been childishly acting as if such was so. Not that I'm particularly worried about Japanese, but the Sasaki exam is going to kill me. Especially early in the morning. Shouldn't someone be told that my brain won't work that early? The test should be given no earlier than noon to give me a good fighting chance at a D.
12/09/00
.......
12/08/00
I am upset, over a fictional character portrayed magnetically by Russell Crowe. That everything was okay at the end because he was "going to a better place" is not comforting to someone who has doubts about a better place. So, as I've done every time in my life where a character, whether in a book or a movie, who I've grown attached to, dies, I am fighting tears. Sigh.
12/07/00
Random thought upon seeing a forlorn woman on a street corner, chin tilted up towards the streetlights that denied her passage : perhaps she just exists slowly.
12/06/00
I thought it was about me; I really did. And I was happy for a scant few hours, thinking it'd been a little special encouragement, thinking that, to make up for years of wishing that people would do special, unexpected little things to cheer me up when I'm down, someone had stepped up to the oft-lonely batter's box. But as is so often the case, assumptions that are made turn out to be so much fluff, and it was not about me. It was no statement of support from an unexpected quarter... just a bit of unrelated chaff on the water of life that I happened to notice at a time when I wanted to interpret it in my favor. Ah well. I got a few hours stolen pleasure from it, and I suppose there is that.
12/05/00
I miss having a home where I felt safe, comfortable. But perhaps it never existed; I don't know when the last time was that I felt like I was at home, safe, unquestionably accepted. I wonder if I long after a figment of my imagination, a mind construct fashioned out of fancied bits and pieces of others' lives. Was there a time before eggshell carefulness around Jeff and snobbing from Richard? Was there a time before obnoxiously loud neighbors and invasion of space by people out of touch with reality, at Mercer? Was there a time before learning that Melissa was the second-most inconsiderate roommate possible, before Cathy quietly made all of my clothing smell odd, before learning unwillingly all too much about Julie's life? Was there a time before Amelia told me daily how worthless I was? Was there a time before Krista would invite her friends in for drunken rounds of insulting me? Was there really a time before Dad and I alternately argued or didn't talk, before Bryce and I bickered over everything, before Mama and I fought silently? Perhaps there never was, for me or anyone else. Most likely the myth of the happy home is just a fiction of the common mind, clung to so as to have hope that some day, things could be that way "again."
12/04/00
I am so angry that I want to vomit.
I have a terrible habit of projecting my own feelings of self-loathing and inadequacy on others, such that I convince myself that they feel the way that I do about myself. I've known this for years, and my dad's said it me on a number of occasions. I'm relatively certain that at least 75% of people that know me would agree, and the other 25% don't know me well enough to care. So with that in mind, let's talk about me.
There's some times in life where I feel like doing nothing more than throwing myself in front of a car. That would show me, I think. How would I feel, knowing that the last thing that I thought about myself was being incredibly angry? And I contemplate how much better I'd feel if I jumped off the bridge I'm walking over, preferably timed delicately with oncoming traffic. But then I realize, I wouldn't care. I wouldn't even think of that. I wouldn't bother to miss me, and I certainly wouldn't even have it occur to me to feel guilty, or to wish that I'd apologized to myself. I feel that I have no respect for me, and no desire for my company. I feel that I only care about myself with it's convenient, or when I press it upon me. I can't be bothered to be nice to me, because I'm not worth it. Any lingering need or desire that I had for myself is being fulfilled by someone else, so there's no point left in acknowledging myself above and beyond what is absolutely necessary. And what is not absolutely necessary is being nice to myself. It wastes my time to do so, and I don't really think of it in the first place anyway.
I don't feel any better for having said that, unfortunately, and I know it won't help what I think I'm thinking about myself. I wish that acknowledging things made them go away. Perhaps if I remind myself that it's only I that hate myself, or don't care about myself, enough times, I'll start believing it. But how can I, when I so often am surrounded by actions that play into my beliefs?
12/03/00
I feel like going back and reading again the only book I loved where I despised the main character.
12/02/00
At this stage in the game, I feel that it is appropriate to say that for the longest time, I did not know that I Feel Free was not an original David Bowie song. You, you're all I want to know... sounded so natural when sung by him that I never suspected that it was a cover. But then again, until my mother heard Type O Negative's Summer Breeze and doubled over laughing that a gothic band had covered Seal and Croft, I never picked up on that one, either. So perhaps I'm not the best qualified to judge.
I am beginning to wonder if I've hit that point in my life where my brain has stopped developing ("they" do say lately that it stretches into teenage years and twenties), and I can no longer expand my mind. I can cram bits and pieces of information into nooks and crannies, but it's not as easy as it used to be, when I could simply extend a wing for something new. Things get sacrificed and lost, without my consent or immediate knowledge. And then one day I'll find that I'm completely senile. These things happen, you know.
2:07 in the morning, and there's new headers to look at! The "gone" ones were done this morning in the CRC, but the "error" ones are the result of my first serious attempt to figure out the Gimp a little bit. I'm not really pleased with any of them, but they're not REALLY ugly. And the 401.png intentionally looks suspiciously like this one... I thought it appropriate to have my first real Gimp effort mimic the style in clumsiness of my first Photoshop effort. Oh yeah, and I replaced my processor fan (courtesy an extra fan of Richard), put up Christmas lights, learned how to (clumsily) kb-switch in Emacs, replaced all of the TWU default "Error ---" code .cgi scripts, cleaned my room, did some laundry, and experimented a little bit with cooking. I had to make up for last night. ;)
12/01/00
Hah. How's that for a prompt turn-over? So there. I have to go to bed early... I, for some unknown reason, offered to cover Ashley's morning shift tomorrow. I have no idea what I was thinking. So none of the bi-weekly Friday late-night computer tweaking for me, tonight. Ah, well.